This $150,000 School Promises Kids Will Make $1 Million… Or Your Tuition Back | Nat Eliason

Nat, thank you so much for joining me today on Misunderstood.

I'm so excited to have you here ever since I saw the headlines about this school and the promises you're making about kids that will be guaranteed to make a million dollars by the time they graduate or their money back in their tuition.

I have a million questions for you.

So welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on.

Excited to answer them.

Okay.

So can you introduce yourself for people that have not heard of you before? I want to know because you look super young.

First of all, how you came up with like where where you came from and what your past has been that's gotten to this point for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

Gosh, where do I start? I've been working for myself for the last 10 years, been an entrepreneur since basically right after I graduated college, ran a marketing agency, exited and sold that, had my own influencer info business, worked as a software engineer during the crazy crypto era of 21, 22, published a couple of books, have done a whole bunch of different entrepreneurial things.

And about two and a half, three years ago now, got really, really deep into building with AI.

I was pretty early on what we now call vibe coding, using AI to build software to help build businesses, and had just been talking about it really publicly, what I was doing and interested in, and was kind of figuring out where that was going to lead to with the next business that I wanted to work on.

And as that was kind of coming together, my now colleague, Cameron, reached out to me in Austin because he was working with a school called Alpha School, which has been around since 2014.

We'll have about 40 or 50 schools this fall.

It's a K-12 school that uses...

AI tutors to compress the academic day to two hours in the morning so that the students can spend the bulk of the day on life skills workshops.

Anything from kindergartners climbing a 30-foot rock wall to build grit and bravery workshops and resiliency to our fifth graders run a food truck for a period of the year in Austin where they serve breakfast food and they have to manage all of their cost of goods and their inventory and they have to run the register and they have to run a whole food truck, right? And so these are the kinds of things Alpha students are doing.

We had a number of high schoolers, Alpha had a number of high schoolers who were really entrepreneurial, who had started trying to build businesses, started figuring out how to make money before they even graduated high school, before they could drive a car.

And they went to the principal of Alpha and they said, you should do a version of high school.

That is purely catered to students like us who are really entrepreneurial, who want to learn how to build businesses because we have enough time to do it.

We have three, four, five hours a day to work on entrepreneurship, but we want even more support for going after it.

And so that's where the idea came from a year ago.